Archive for the ‘Las Vegas’ tag

Las Vegas at night in black and white is cool, but seeing it in color is just glorious sensory overload. A lineup of traffic under those lights just makes it all that better. We recently came across two such photos, the one above coming from Vintage Las Vegas and the one below from Straight Six on Tumblr. Both date to the 1960s – though separated by a few years – and it appears both were shot directly across Fremont Street from each other. What do you see here?

Wait, Las Vegas isn’t all casinos and glitzy gimmicky hotels, neon, and a grillion light bulbs, nor has it always been so? Based on most photos of Sin City, including those we’ve shown in our carspotting series, it’s probably hard for most folks to peer past the facade and see the everyday goings-on conducted in everyday cars and trucks, as we see in this photo from Vintage Las Vegas, taken on Paradise Avenue and looking west, and in which it’s difficult to spot anything remotely Vegas-y. Not so today. What do you see here?

Nighttime street scenes typically make for more difficult carspotting photos: The dim lighting obscures many a detail, leaving silhouettes and impressions, just barely enough for vague identifications. Except in Las Vegas, where the neons and the billions of Hoover Dam electricity-sucking incandescents light up the night and give us a much better shot at nailing down years, makes and models. Vintage Las Vegas recently posted these three nighttime shots of Fremont Street from an unknown photographer. What do you see here?

Twenty-five years before this parking lot became the inadvertent resting place for much of the Hacienda resort and casino after the building’s botched New Year’s Eve implosion—and before it became the site of the current-day Mandalay Bay—it seemed to be a booming place, packed with a pretty good variety of cars and trucks, as we can see from this photo that Vintage Las Vegas recently shared. What do you see here?

Within a couple of days, Vintage Las Vegas posted these two up-high shots of the Riviera’s sign and parking lot, one taken in 1967 (above, uncredited) and the other in 1968 (below, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown). As you all should be well aware by now, context is everything with these vintage carspotting photos, so getting two shots of one location in two adjacent years is a rare opportunity to study how much or how little car tastes and fortunes change in a year. What do you see here?

Most photos of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas that we’ve seen show the dramatic googie/mid-century entrance to the casino – along with the famed Champagne Tower – but as Vintage Las Vegas pointed out, this unknown photographer visiting the Flamingo in 1962 decided to turn around and take some photos of everything around the place. For us carspotters, the most interesting of those photos is the one above, showing the parking lot and the Flamingo Motel. What do you see here?

Are the Las Vegas carspotting scenes we run – like these two, courtesy Vintage Las Vegas – as representational of what Americans drove at the time as any of the rest of the carspotting scenes? After all, Las Vegas is a destination, a place where people went on vacation, a place that attracted a certain demographic. We’re more likely to see carspotting scenes at the glitzy casinos and resorts rather than at the Las Vegas grocery stores. Then again, even Las Vegas and that certain demographic were part of the entire American landscape, so while these photos aren’t representational of the whole, they’re still illustrative, particularly as a part of the whole. Anyway, up top is the Stardust as seen from the Silver Slipper, and below we see the Thunderbird, both located on the strip. What do you see here?

How many times will we see the Stardust casino and hotel in our carspotting series? After all, this photo, which we came across over on Vintage Las Vegas, marks the fifth time over the last couple years we’ve seen some version of the famous facade at 3000 South Las Vegas Boulevard. The answer, of course, is however many times we come across photos of the Stardust with plenty of cars parked out front. What do you see here?

Last weekend’s Rogers Classic Car Museum sale in Las Vegas, Nevada, truly offered something for everyone interested in mostly postwar American automobiles. In addition to the 200-plus cars that crossed the block, the sale featured an affordable array of display engines from American automakers, covering the period from 1949 to 1966.

Sold for display purposes only, most engines were incomplete and likely suffering from a variety of mechanical problems, making them potentially unsuitable for use in restorations. Unlike most display engines, none were cut away to show the inner workings of valvetrains, or pistons within cylinders, or transmission gear selection. As mechanical sculpture, they were interesting pieces, guaranteed to spark conversation, and ideal centerpieces for a finished garage or rec room

Some were little more than engine blocks, painted and likely awaiting the addition of parts as sourced. A Chrysler 318 V-8, undated but likely from the late 1950s, drew a winning bid of $300, but was little more than a block, heads, valve covers and an oil pan. A 1954 Mercury 256-cu.in V-8 in a similar state (but complete with water pump and thermostat housing) also sold for $300.

In total, the sale raised $9.5 million to assist the Rogers Foundation, a charity that supports higher education in Southern Nevada started by Jim Rogers prior to his death in June of 2014. For complete results from the Rogers Classic Car Museum auction, visit Mecum.com.

While this photo taken from one of the hotel rooms at the Riviera on the Las Vegas strip—dated December 1966 and courtesy Vintage Las Vegas—isn’t of the highest resolution and depicts the cars in the parking lot below at a distance, there’s plenty of vehicles to take guesses at, and there’s still just enough detail and distinctive shapes to serve as clues to the identities of the cars. Zoom in and tell us what you see here.